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Create a folder anywhere you would like, on whatever drive you would like (if it is removable, make sure it is mounted before Carrara is started) and then in Carrara's browser window, click the little black icon on the top right of the window. You should see a menu with the option to add a folder. Click it, and a little window will pop up and ask what type of shader it is. I usually just choose the top.
The little black icon is contextual based on the Browser you're in. For instance, if you're in the Content Browser, the option to Add a folder, becomes the option to Add Runtime. Detect Runtime, etc.
The problem with this system is that the folders appear in the browser in the order that you load them, and not alphabetically for instance. The only way to put them in a specific order is to remove them and manually load them, unless there's a hack I'm not aware of.
Thanks for the help to my previous questions. Now I have a new one.
How does one go about parenting a sphere to the camera such that if the camera moves the sphere follows it? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
The easiest way is in the Instances tab, just drag the sphere on top of the Camera, and it will be parented. I do that all the time with lights, parent them to the camera so you have a camera with light, like some real movie cameras. Or like a flash with a still camera.
And BTW, the XYZ position of the sphere after it's parented can be changed to offset it from the camera location, since all the XYX values are relative to the parent.
Ah, of course! Thanks again Joe!!!!!
A new question. For some reason when I attempted to render my tropical scene with Carrara native I ran into a few issues.
1. Carrara appeared to stall for about an hour with no progress bars or indicators of what was happening under the hood.
2. Eventually a Filling Grid progress bar showed up. Again it took another hour at least for that to begin. By this point in time I was already turned in to bed for the night.
3. So my computer ran all night on this. When I awaken I find that Carrara has indeed rendered the scene, but it seems to be rendering it as an animation and not as a still frame as it was intended. At no point did I purposefully move any timeline sliders, nor have I set any keyframes for any objects or textures or anything. There shouldn't be any information except for a single frame. Realize as well that I have used no lights in the scene, there was no GI to calculate
So now to my questions.
1. Is it customary for scenes with a crap ton of replicators to take hours just to precalculate the scene geometry? If so, is there a sort of limit or threshold one chould avoid crossing with memory?
2. How do I remove all timeline information so that Carrara knows to render only a single still frame?
For those who may not know my history I am in many ways still very new to Carrara. I have played around extensively with a few parts of it, but on the whole I do not know much about it. Most of my recent rendering experience has been with OR4C. I have created shaders for the scene but every shader so far is assigned as an Octane Material, I do not have any Carrara shaders at all in this scene so far. Wanting to learn how to texture and light the scene in Carrara native rendering is the reason why I have suddenly decided to see how it looks rendered natively in Carrara. It only takes a few moments for OR4C to calculate the geometry of the scene so it really surprised me to see how long it takes for Carrara to calculate it's own replicators.
At this point I am trying to get to grips with the practical imitations of Carrara insofar as if it takes hours to precalculate a render then I'd never be able to distribute this scene as a product, customers would all demand their money back.
Any feedback on any of these issues is greatly appreciated. Thanks all for your time.
On the Render Output tab, under File format, there's a set of radio buttons that says Current Frame or Movie. Make sure this is set to Current Frame (sometimes it changes, but I have no idea why. probably something else I clicked, but...)
I have a scene with about 50,000 replicated objects - plants, trees, grass etc, and that only takes a minute or two on the precalculate section. How many is a "crap ton"?
Thanks, Tim! I am trying that option out now.
By a crap ton, I mean incredible numbers. I probably have 25 replicators, some with as many as 100,000 copies and some as few as 5000. So lets say they average about 50,000 each. That's s good 25 times as many replications as your current scene uses. The area covers a square mile in every direction. Compared to a Howie Farkes level scene, I wouldn't suspect my numbers were really all that high. That's why I'm asking.
I should also note that I am using OBJ trees, not Carrara plants so there are no primitives involved.
Sometimes even though you are not advancing along the timeline, sticking something in the scene that has an animation associated with it already, will change the render room setting to movie mode instead of current frame. You didn't insert a particle emitter, fire primitive or something like that?
That is an awful lot of replicators and replications. Are all those replicators in camera view? If your scene is a mile square, there may be ways to optimize the replicators. The higher geometry objects could play a part as well.
What I do with a large and complex scene like that is to figure out some camera angles that show off key aspects of the landscape/scene. Then I design my replicators around that, keeping in mind, that if this is for other users, they my have entirely different ideas on camera placement., so flexibility is important.
What do I mean by designing my replicators around the camera angles? A good example is my free Fantasy Village Terrain. It is pretty simple compared to the renders you've been posting, but the same principles could be applied. For the surrounding trees, I basically, I split my scene into rough quadrants, and used the 3D paint tool to paint distribution maps for the individual quadrants (they can overlap a bit). I then inserted four surface replicators and used one for each quadrant, and one of the distribution maps. This allows the user to hide the visibility or reduce the replications of the replicators that are not in view, thus speeding up the grid calculations and lighting calculations if GI is used.
I also used the same principal for the water plants in the ponds and some extra tree replicators, all for the same purpose. If they're not in view, you can hide them or reduce the number of replications. If the user is making an animation, hiding and unhiding create keyframes, so the user could hide a replicator when off frame and unhide it as the camera moves that way.
Following are some illustration from the manual that I included with the Fantasy Village Terrain.
I have no idea about your problem, I can only speculate. But clearly you've entered the land of the lost with that much stuff in your scene. Perhaps you've exceed what the software designers thought nobody would ever exceed, and they set their array sizes to a certain value and you exceeded that, so the software is trying to cope with it. Or maybe with all of that stuff you've exceeded your hardware memory limitations and it's writing stuff to disk all night long and that's why it took so long. Who knows?
But as I think Evil was trying to explain, the best way to handle big scenes is to make them into small ones. Yeah, it's easier to just throw a crap ton of crap into a scene so you don't have to worry about planning and optimizing your individual shot placements, but practically it can cause all kinds of problems. I generally shy away from big huge monster size scenes, in favor of smaller scenes designed around individual shots. Which is kind of what professional filmmakers do if you think about it. The director has a scene to film in a specific location, and he sets up all the cameras and lights and crew actors around a specific movie set (like a room or a street corner or inside a 747), and does some very limited shots and camera angles.
Anyway, sorry I can't be of more help, but if I was you I'd first check that you're not maxing out your computer memory which is causing a lot of disk access. And if that's not the problem, I'd definitely consider doing what Evil suggested, which is modularize your scenes based on individual shots. That's why Carrara and other software comes with a "Storyboard" feature that probably nobody on the planet actually uses... :)
I'm embarrassed to admit, but I haven't used the Storyboard room. ;-)
From what Rashad has mentioned in other threads, it sounds as if he is working on creating a project to sell. If this is the case, then a large and detailed scene is what is needed, but I would definitely work on optimizing the performance of the scene, such as:
Limiting the number of master objects.
Limiting the number of master shaders.
Deciding what geometry needs to be low, medium or high.
Designing the replicators up so that the user has freedom to hide them or reduce the replications.
Plants that are on the edge of the scene could possibly be lower quality.
Optimized lighting solutions, such as simulated GI or just Skylight may be enough to add the required realism without full Indirect Light. Use of saved Irradiance Maps can speed light calculations for Skylight or Indirect Light scenes and are camera angle independent, meaning one map for the scene, regardless of camera position.
storyboard room hangs my computer. I avoid it like dog poo
Another question. Sometimes, Carrara just hangs, and I cannot figure out why. I used to think that perhaps there was an auto-save action occurring, but I'm not at all certain that is the case because I don't know if Carrara even has an auto-save option.
I've been left hanging in several circumstances so I'm aware of a few potential problems
1. I know that entering and exiting the various editors can be slow generally. Vertex Editor is really slow to open most times. Seems that any imported mesh over 100,000 polygons is going to take several moments (perhaps a minute or more) to open the Vertex Editor. I've also experienced major slowdowns when editing Surface Replicators, eternal time needed to open and another eternity required to exit.
2. I've also had major hang ups when moving objects about on the Instance List. Simply moving an item to a different part of the tree can send Carrara into a multiple minute long hourglass spin.
I've been working with Carrara a bit more without OR4C running to see if they are plug-in related or native to Carrara. Tonight for example is a perfect example of how I haven't initiated OR4C yet but I am getting unexplained slow downs.
Is it just me? Is this a problem that only arises in the most complex of scenarios (of which I am indeed working on)? Are there any setting for the interface that can help with that? I should state that I am already keeping my wireframe view as simplified as possible, the replicators are all set to display nothing in the wireframe.
Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Undo (cmd-Z) is a major source of hangs and crashes in my experience. All you can really do is save lots - which can be a slow process in itself, especially when the dreaded "an error occurred during save" message pops up.
Didn't Evil or Fenric or someone determine that the error during save was caused by deleting an object which still left a hanging reference to a remaining object in the scene? And the fix is to make sure you do "remove unused objects" and "shaders" often and early?
Not sure if that has anything to do with Rashad's problems, but if you dont' already have the remove objects and remove shaders as shortcut keys I'd recommend you do that and get in the habit of using them often. It helps if you drink a lot of coffee and your fingers always twitch over those shortcut keys....
I hadn't heard of that, but I'll keep it in mind and see if it makes a difference. (when a big scene can take 10 or 15 minutes to save - especially if you have a genesis/g2 character or two in it, it's not something you want to have to keep repeating!)
Also, did you see Evil's other advice about turning off compression when you save, and instead use windows file compression or equivalent. i think Fenric said the Carrara compression is kinda sucky. Turning off compression saves a LOT of time when saving files
Joe, thanks so much for the reminder. Indeed, I somehow must have overlooked it or failed to comprehend it when I read it. I will certainly try that out. Thanks a ton! Also thanks to Evil!!!
Again, either I didn't see it, or it fell out of my skull (must find a less leaky one...)
I have also heard that reducing the number of Undos (in the preferences under Application) can help, but that may have been more to do with the 32 bit version.
Something that can help a bit with reducing sluggishness in the Assembly room is to enable the Hide Object in 3D View checkbox (not to be confused with the Visibility checkbox). The object will be invisible in the Assembly room, but will still be rendered. I usually use this for replicators after I have them set up the way I wish, and am moving on to another scene element. It really helps if there is a large number of replications.
There are other areas to help speed up a sluggish Assembly room.
If you are using a terrain, you can lower the preview quality of the terrain. Remember, if the render resolution and the preview resolution are very different, even objects in a surface replicator can appear to be floating above the terrain or sunken into it. With regards to the surface replicator, it is just an illusion due to the lower preview quality. If you are manually placing objects onto a terrain, then the preview resolution and render resolution should be the same, so that the placement is accurate. When you are done, you can revert back to a lower preview resolution.
If you are using the Ocean Primitive, you can lower the resolution to speed up Assembly room speed.
A good way to speed up 64 bit Carrara is to open the Preferences and under Imaging and Scratch Disk, you will find Texture Spooling. From everything I have read, you will want to turn that off.
This is a super helpful thread. Thanks to everyone for their input.
I should add that if you lower the resolution of the ocean, it will speed up Assembly room performance, but you will want to put it back to the resolution you want before rendering, as there is no preview size. If you set it to 32, it will render at 32.